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province is invited to, on a confidential basis, evaluate you and your trial ethics and trial skills, and you’re evaluated as being very favorable, favorable, very favorable by reputation, favorable by reputa- tion, unfavorable, unfavorable by reputation, and then two other -- two other possibilities that reflect a lack of knowledge of you. And that information is very confidential; no one knows who responds in a particular way except one person, and that’s the regent in your state or province, who receives the results of the poll with the names of the people who responded about you, and then undertakes to do his or her own independent evaluation. This means going back and calling all of the people who have responded on your poll, and especially those who have responded less than very favorable or very favorable by reputation. What was it that made the response unfavorable? Was it sour grapes or was it something more significant? “It may mean going into the trial transcript and reading that cross-examination where some respond- er felt that you cheated on the law or went over the line, or going back to the judge in a case and asking the judge whether in fact you reneged on a promise that you made to the court, or reading a deposition transcript and finding out whether or not, in the regent’s opinion, you really did act in an uncivil way. “The Past Presidents take a special delight in probing this. As the regents in the room know, the Past Presidents don’t have a vote, but they have a voice and they’re not shy in letting it be known. “The regent will bring that information, either favorable or unfavorable for you or about you, to the Board of Regents in the form of a motion; either a motion to approve your candidacy in the College or to disapprove your candidacy in the College, or in some cases maybe to defer your consideration to a later date until more can be found out about you. The motion will then be debated and a vote will be taken. “But even that’s not quite the end of the process because as you all know, if you’ve been approved by the board, you will then get a notice of qualifications that you had to fill out from the national office that will talk about grievances, lawsuits, sanctions – anything else that we should know, that maybe the investigation or the investigators didn’t quite find out. 61 JOURNAL “That takes a lot of work, and the regents take it very seriously. One of our former officers said that bringing this information to the Board of Regents is like making an appellate argument in a federal court because the regent who is responsible for your state or province will have to answer questions from the Board of Regents and the Past Presidents, who will have the poll results (but not the names) in front of them and who are very eager to find any weakness in the work that was done by the state or province committee, or the regent himself or herself.